After many such requests, in June , Steiner finally held an "Agriculture Course" with many of these farmers in Koberwitz, a small village which was then in Germany but is now Poland. The eight lectures and five discussions of that course have been transcribed in the book Agriculture and form the basis of the biodynamic method. Steiner was one of the first public figures to warn that the widespread use of chemical fertilizers would lead to the decline of soil, plant and animal health and the subsequent devitalization of food.
He was also the first to bring the perspective of the farm as a single, self-sustaining organism that thrives through biodiversity, the integration of crops and livestock and the creation of a closed-loop system of fertility.
Steiner also brought forth a unique and comprehensive approach to soil, plant, animal and human health that recognizes the importance of the healthy interplay of cosmic and earthly influences.
During , his lecturing activity reached a climax, and he held lectures from the beginning of the year to September 29, when he became exhausted and had to stop all public activity.
He died six months later, on 30 March in Dornach. News of Steiner's death spread quickly. An obituary appeared in the New York Times the next day, focusing on Steiner's contributions to social theory, writing:. For more on Goethe, see. For his autobiography online, see - The Story of My Life. For the majority of the published books and dramas by Steiner online, see here at the site of RSArchive.
For some 2, of his appr. For more on anthroposophy, see another section at this site. For some comments on Rudolf Steiner and Waldorf education by educators, cultural and other well-known personalities, see here. Copyright Robert Mays and Sune Nordwall. Rudolf Rudolf Joseph Laurence Steiner, who was of German-Austrian origin, was born on 25 February, usually, biographies give the date of his baptism, two days later, as his birth date. His place of birth was a tiny village, Kraljevec, then within the borders of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
Today, it is part of Croatia. March Rudolf Steiner in Switzerland was received in Berlin today. Steiner was 65 years old, and was the leader of the Anthroposophical Movement, which has its headquarters at Dornach, in the Alps. Steiner was born at Kraijevio in Silesia, in From his youth onwards, he devoted himself to the study and propagation of Goethe's ideals [ Here again, Steiner emphasized that we need to develop a distinct realm of social organization to support this sphere, inspired by a concern for equality not equality of spiritual capacity or material circumstance, but that sense of equality that awakens through recognition of the essential spiritual nature of every human being.
These insights were the basis from which Steiner then began to respond to a great variety of requests for new beginnings and practical help in many fields. He was approached by doctors, therapists, farmers, businessmen, academics and scientists, theologians and pastors, and by teachers. From these beginnings have grown the many activities which have survived all the tensions and upheavals of this century, and which continue to spread round the world.
Best known, of course, is the work in education and curative education. The former originated in a request from Emil Molt, director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, for a school to which his employees could send their children. There are now Waldorf Schools throughout the world. The homes, schools and village communities for handicapped children and adults are also flourishing. It has made its main impact so far in European countries, but is now attracting rapidly growing interest in many other parts of the world.
From a request by a group of German pastors there developed the Christian Community, a movement for religious renewal. The art of eurythmy, which also serves the educational and therapeutic work, has developed strongly, and there are now a number of eurythmy schools where a full four-year training is given.
Other training centres for teacher training, agriculture, the arts, social work, and general orientation in anthroposophy have grown up in recent years.
Rudolf Steiner died on March 30, , surrounded by new beginnings. The versatility and creativity he revealed in his later years are phenomenal by any standards. How did he achieve all this? The last part of the twentieth century is bringing a growing recognition that we live within a deeper reality we can call spiritual, to which at present we have direct access only through altered conditions of consciousness.
We are also learning to see that these realities were known in the past, described in other images and languages, and were the source of all great religious and spiritual teachings.
They have been obscured and forgotten for a while as our scientific culture devoted itself to the material world revealed by the senses.
Many individuals have glimpses during their lives of spiritual realities. Some recollect a more consistent experience in childhood. A few achieve some form of enduring insight as adults. Rudolf Steiner spoke little of spiritual life in personal terms. But in his autobiography he indicates that from childhood he was fully conscious of a world of invisible reality within the world of everyday.
His inner struggle for the first forty years of his life was not to achieve spiritual experience, but to unite this fully with the forms of knowledge and insight of our time, and in particular with the language and discipline of natural science. He himself saw the scientific age, even in its most materialistic aspects, as an essential phase in the spiritual education of mankind. Only by forgetting the spiritual world for a time and attending to the material world, he said, could there be kindled new and essential faculties, notably an experience of true individual inner freedom.
Steiner indicated that his own capacities to meet, in the most practical way, the life questions and working needs of people from so many walks of life, had their origins in the struggles of his earlier years, when he kept almost complete silence concerning his inner experiences, and gradually learned to grasp and articulate their relationship to the mode of consciousness from which science arises.
Studied more intimately, this book contains the basis for a path of knowledge that can lead the soul to discover spiritual experience and reality right into the world of ordinary thought and experience. Along this path, Steiner sought to develop a spiritual science that is a further development of the true spirit of natural science. He saw that the meaning of this event transcends all differentiations of religion, race or nation, and has consequences for all humanity; we are as yet aware only of the beginnings of these.
This also led him to know the new presence and working of the Christ, which has begun just in this century, not in the physical world but in the sphere of invisible life-forces of the earth and of mankind.
Steiner was therefore not concerned to bring old teachings in new forms, nor to promulgate doctrines of any kind, but to nurture a path of knowledge in freedom, and of love in action, that can meet the deep and pressing needs of our times. These are the ideals, however imperfectly realized, by which those who find in anthroposophy a continuing inspiration for their lives and work seek to be guided.
Geologically, Austria-Hungary reflected the different periods through which the mineral earth came to its present form— just as the Earth itself is the microcosmic result of all-embracing Divine thoughts.
Into this universal scene, natural and human, where the true self has been striven for, Rudolf Steiner was born on 27 February, He had a link with each of the most important national groups, Germans, Slavs and Hungarians, for his parents came from the German-speaking Waldviertel, he himself was born in Kraljewic in the southern Slav region and he went to school in Neudoerfl, a Hungarian village near the Lower Austrian frontier.
As a young man he studied mathematics, natural science and chemistry at Vienna University and also read works on political and economic theory. Behind the socialist claims he could see only a deliberate blindness to true realities and it seemed to him one of the tragedies of the age that the social question, which is of universal importance, was publicized by men so entirely absorbed in materialism. From the gallery of the Austrian Parliament building, at the side of his old friend and teacher, Karl Julius Schroer, Rudolf Steiner had often followed the passionate political debates in which the characteristics of the different peoples found expression.
Spiritual life needed to unfold independently, in harmony with the aims of the folk souls and unfettered by the power of the state. It was while he still lived in Vienna that Steiner prepared his first major work, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Nature makes of him merely a natural being; society, one whose actions are governed by laws; only by his own effort can he attain to freedom.
Yet freedom must be attributed to the human will insofar as it realizes purely ideal intuitions; for these are not eh effects of a necessity imposed from without, but are grounded in themselves. Rudolf Steiner leads man to confidence in his individual path. There was then no question of separation, but of finding ways of living together that would be acceptable to all. The Slavs were mainly concerned about political interference in their intellectual life.
The Czechs inwardly rebelled against the Germans, who in turn felt threatened by the Czechs, although they shared the memory of a long historical past that had proved fruitful in many ways. The Italian areas also suffered from the control exercised by Vienna over their cultural life. The inhabitants of the south of the Tyrol were only partly German, yet even those whose mother-tongue was Italian felt linked to Central Europe in many respects.
Among the Hungarians, proud and independent as they were, the conflict had begun several decades earlier; the Empire was therefore now officially called Austria-Hungary. What embittered the Hungarians particularly was official intervention in their cultural life. They could not forget that the Austrian government had destroyed their Protestantism.
But though they were indignant when Vienna introduced German as the official language in Hungary, they accepted that Austrian officials would find it very difficult to learn Hungarian and that some kind of common language was therefore needed. Their choice fell on Latin. German splinter groups in Transylvania, the Banat and the Danube valley had for centuries nursed the culture they had brought with them as settlers from the region around Lake Constance.
From generation to generation, German Christmas plays had thus been performed in Hungary, and this quiet, unobstrusive activity was a source of strength to the Hungarian people as well. The Germans were a healthy ferment in the realm of culture; in part they became absorbed among the Hungarians. Although at the end of the nineteenth century, neither Czechs nor Hungarians were thinking of separating from Austria, opposition grew throughout the Austrian provinces against claims to power that made harmonious regional development impossible.
It was often said that the time had come for profound changes everywhere; but in Austria the dislike of radical change was stronger than the will for renewal, and the new measures taken proved unwise. The Austrian problems were problems of humanity. In the summer of Rudolf Steiner who was not known in political circles approached the leading statesmen of Austria with a proposed solution for the complex situation of Central Europe. He realized that economic and cultural life would be more and more hindered in development if they were not separated from the political sphere; and he gave clear warning of the destructive consequences of the prevailing tendencies.
He proposed that the State should hand over the entire economic life to an administration chosen by its own personalities, not by the government, thus allowing it independent mobility, and should renounce control of cultural life. A freedom could then develop in which minorities could feel at home.
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